​Italy’s Matteo Renzi: New man of destiny

Claudio Gallo is a journalist, currently working as a culture editor at La Stampa, one of the main newspapers in Italy. He was foreign desk editor and London correspondent. Occasionally he writes for AsiaTimes and Enduring America. His main interest is Middle East politics. He was on the streets during the disputed Iranian elections of 2009 and during the start of the so-called Egyptian Spring in 2011. He writing focuses on the Shiite world: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He is banned from India because he supposedly wrote that the real country is very different from the officially publicized image. He likes to interview the last few thinkers who provide alternatives to prevailing ways of thinking.

“A Man of Providence is coming. During my life, I have
already known one of such a character: it was enough to [last]
me, forever.” This is how the great Italian journalist of
postwar period Indro Montanelli described Silvio Berlusconi as,
in some aspects, the heir of Mussolini, when he became Italian
prime minister in 1994.

What brings together the Fascist ‘il Duce’ and ‘il
Cavaliere’ as he is called in Italy, is not obviously
fascism. To believe in a fascist danger after the regime was
buried by history remained only the Italian Left that used
anti-fascism as an ideology to cover its desertion of any real
alternative politics.

The Man of Destiny, the one who can resolve any problem with his
magical charisma is truly an archetype of the Italian psyche,
rooted in the long centuries in which Italy was “a
geographical expression.” Waiting for some outside salvation
became a habit. Through the wringer of history this myth provided
unfailingly rushing starts followed by crushing ends. And now
another Man of Providence is coming.

After the Warrior, after the Entrepreneur, arrives the Good Boy.
Unlike his archetypical predecessor, Matteo Renzi comes almost
out of nowhere. He was a boy scout, a champion of television
quiz, then he made a brief jump into the remnant of Christian
Democrats, after which he joined the Democratic Party (PD), the
large configuration which cover the Center-Left of single thought
in Italy. He became head of Florentine Province and mayor of
Florence. Finally, last December he won the primaries of PD, and
became leader of the party, his springboard to highest power.

He let a magazine shoot some photos of him dressed in a bomber
jacket like Fonzie, or ‘the Fonz’, the good-hearted
bully of American TV series Happy Days. The very next day, while
in Italy the newspapers tried obsessively to compare him to Tony
Blair, British newspapers, with their unbearable,
scarcely-concealed, sense of superiority, started to call him
‘the Fonz’.

At this point, you may still not realize why the Italians are
waiting to be saved by him. To explain this to those who have no
faith is a difficult task. We have to open the mechanism of the
archetype. The Man of Destiny has a recurrence that links him to
the past but every time that he manifests himself he pretends to
be completely new. So when he was still mayor of Florence but was
already making himself a name nationally, the media started to
call him ‘the scrapper’ or ‘demolition man’,
because he proclaimed at every occasion his wish to demolish the
old Mandarins of the Italian party system.

Using a slippery stereotype, we can say that on the streets
Italians shout for change but at home they are very conservative.
This tension between change and conservation results usually in a
noisy practical immobility, or with a slightly misused quotation
from ‘the Leopard’, the novel by Tomasi di Lampedusa:
“For things to remain the same, everything must change.”

Although Renzi’s political roots are in the Catholic center, he
is closing the postwar cycle of the Italian Left that is now a
full-fledged liberal force. Let us compare him to his
predecessors at the secretaryship of PD: Guglielmo Epifani and
Pier Luigi Bersani.

Epifani came from the main leftist Union, Bersani was a former
Communist: while both were substantially adhering to the faith of
the market, they still used a rhetoric that was linked to the
cooperative season of the ’70s. Renzi finally got rid of all
this: he uses a lot of English words, he drives a snobby little
smart car, he is friends with the most successful Italian
financiers in the city.

“In the globalized world there is only one kind of
politics”, said Lord Peter Mandelson, the old guru of Tony
Blair, talking about the choice of Renzi, whom he knows quite
well. The Left is now Niki Vendola’s ‘Left Ecology and
Freedom party’, who as the young philosopher Diego Fusaro
puts it: “Believes that Communism is gay marriage.”

So Renzi, driven by a unique destiny (but not by the votes) got
to the top with the same blocked majority of the preceding
governments. The only difference is he himself, the new Man of
Destiny.

In his first address, with his hands in his pockets, he quoted in
the high & low style loved by his philosophical mentor
Alessandro Baricco, Italian pop stars and Chesterton: “The
world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of
wonder.”

One of his top priorities is schools, usually the Cinderella of
public service. Many school buildings in the country are
literally crumbling down. He also wants to reform the internal
revenue system, one of the most suffocating in Europe, to inject
more money into business and squeeze the elephantine Italian
bureaucracy. This reminds us of the question of Human Rights: who
is directly against them? Who is against this, pre-political one
may say, rationalization? Certainly, no one.

Well, the old Mandarins of politics, that remain in parliament
waiting for vendetta, make you note with a scary smile that those
reforms will cost at least 100 billion euro. Where the hell Renzi
will take this money from a country whose 2012 debt was 120 per
cent of GDP? Taking hope away is a huge crime but we can’t live
by the faith alone.

Claudio Gallo for
RT

Claudio Gallo is a
journalist, currently working as a Culture editor at La Stampa,
where he also was foreign desk editor and London correspondent.
Occasionally, he writes for AsiaTimes and Enduring America. His
main interest is Middle East politics.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.